PDFescape – free online PDF editing

A number of online PDF editors are starting to emerge, and I believe it’s a trend that’s only going to continue, perhaps culminating in Adobe releasing a truly online version of Acrobat.

Previously we’ve looked at PDF Hammer and now we’re going to look at PDFescape. I found PDFescape generally pretty easy to use and the list of features it includes are impressive for an online editor:

View PDFs online

Fill out PDF Forms

Add text and shapes

Move and delete pages

Insert links

Create new form fields

Share & collaborate

Store PDFs online

There are some limitations in place on the size of PDFs that you can upload — the file size cannot be over 2MB and the number of pages cannot be over 25.

In addition, PDFescape also includes a white out tool — but be warned — the white out tool does not redact/delete anything, it simply adds an object on top of existing text or images to hide them. Meaning that the information you have “whited out” could still be viewed if another person was to delete the white out object. Obviously this is bad if you’re trying to hide sensitive information. Unfortunately this isn’t an uncommon issue: many, many people have been burned by issue in the past using a variety of application, including Adobe Acrobat.

Also, keep in mind that it doesn’t provide true PDF text editing — you can’t for instance edit existing text in your PDFs — but you can add new text, which is still pretty useful.

It’s not as powerful as a desktop PDF editor, but really, that’s an unfair comparison, because this solution is hosted entirely online, and it’s free.

For those of you who want something a little more powerful, the developers behind PDFescape also sell a product called PDFtypewriter, which lets you create, edit and secure PDFs.

Please note: this article was originally published at Digital Documents and has been republished with permission.

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